SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

HouseOfPlane

Here’s a big one. The amount of information that we really know as truth is pretty sparse. A huge amount of what we "know" is really based on culture and belief. On stories that we have told ourselves.We tend to see what we think we see.

Agreed, and I’d like to add, that we hear what we think we heard.

Where that really gets revealed by the affair is how we think this person is one thing, and they’re completely another. It’s pretty rare that there aren’t actually signs of an ongoing affair, but none are so blind as choose not to see. We have in our minds this person that we think the WS is, and that’s not who it really is.

So very true. There were signs, but I’d like to rephase your words to fit how I interpret my reaction to the signs. It wasn’t that I chose because I didn’t want to see but rather because what I thought I knew about my wife did not fit what I was finding off center so what I chose was to believe her over myself.

The WS, who is living in a world of lies, will take advantage of that. And of course they will, as they attempt to manipulate things and fill that hole in their self.

When you hear phrases like "I can’t believe they did that" or "that is not like them" then you can see it in action.
If they did it, then they did it. There’s nothing to believe.
If they did it, then it is "like them". You are what you do.
And yet here we are denying what is right in front of us, because we cling tightly to that person that only actually truly existed in our head. It correlates with what is in front of us, but it’s not the same.

On this, we depart somewhat. I think it is risky to lump motives on any group based on individual’s actions. I don’t believe my wife…Crap! I started to push back against your thoughts here but then I had to remind myself that she did take advantage of my trust. She did manipulate me when I asked if something was developing with her affair partner that wasn’t honorable and she gaslit me by saying I was seeing something that was not there. So, I stand by my thought about lumping but upon trying to separate my wife from your idea, she fell firmly into the group and I fell into a man that doesn’t want so see my wife in that light. I don’t think she is like that today, but I will never trust that I know that as a fact. As you have stated, I must stay present and make judgements based on current events, not past not future.

So when practice, I’ve learned to work at unknowing people. To work at forgetting everything I know about them, and seeing them with fresh eyes, as they are right here right now in front of me. Really, to just actually see them. When you do it for a while, you’ll become aware of how much preconception we carry around with us. It can be jarring too, like that movie Field of Dreams where all of a sudden people see a baseball game going on where before all they saw was a Field of Corn.

This is a very interesting and forien thought, one that gives me pause. I’m going to have to pause and rethink my current ways of "knowing people" and give this room to root.

When you do this, when you really actually see the person while they are in front of you and talking to you, and you pay attention to it, you’ll see it affect the person. It might even freak them out a little bit.

I’m not sure what this means but then again, it is new way to process that is going to take me some time to understand and decide it I want to incorporate it.

In interactions we count on people believing things about us, and we can’t help but take advantage of it at least a little bit. Your mom thinks you’re the brightest kid in the class, etc. Just the same with a WS, they can’t help but use that mental model you hold of them to try to gently manipulate the situation. When truly being seen, it can feel like someone staring at your sou

No matter the method is used, I’m not sure anyone can truly see another. It is difficult to impossible to know oneself let alone another. This puts me a bit at odds with the idea you are presenting. Maybe more fairly stated, as I interpret your idea. I’m open to discussing this more.

I do have a few questions. If it is true that one can never know another and that my task is to "unknow" what I think I know of my wife, then where and how does "trust" fit into this equation? What is it built upon? Where is its foundation if everything is unknowable? And if a spouse proves who they are by lying and cheating (as I understood you to say) is that it? They are forever liars and cheaters or is there a way for them to change? And if change is possible and they do, how am I to know if my understanding of them is "unknowable? I know ( no pun intended) that I’m missing something here, so help this novice out, please.

P.S. I’ve looked into The Book of Not-Knowing by Peter Ralston and am fascinated by the reviews I’ve read. I am traveling in Europe at the moment but will order the book and read it once I’m back in the States.

Asterisk

Trumansworld

Having to ask each day, who really is this stranger I chose to wed, isn’t a bad thing.

You may have a point, especially considering HouseOfPlane’s suggestion of

a person is never able to actually know a person.

Asterisk

Bos491233

All of those things created an environment where there was not much time for "us". NOW, that does NOT excuse the choice or where the blame should fall but it was important for me to recognize that the situation we were living in contributed to this and "helped" make the choice easier.

I couldn’t agree more. Infidelity does not occur in a vacuum. This is why I often maintain that it is important for me to recognize my role. In doing so, it gives my wife and myself the grace necessary for her and me to change so that reconciliation has a chance. And as you stated, this is not relieving my wife of her conscious decision to cheat, that is fully on her. But, the environment she was attempting to navigate, which I was a part of, played a role as well.

Asterisk

Oldwounds

Blame doesn't solve much.

I don’t know, is that really true? Isn’t justifiable "blame" nessissary in order to ferrit out the behavior that is inappropreate? And in the process, isn’t very important to discover one’s own blame? Not in blame as in it is the betrayed’s blame for the decision of a wayward only, as shared so elegantly by Bos491233, they were part of the equation that led up to infidelity? But maybe you are saying that at some point it becomes unhelpful for the reconciliation to continue the blame game. From that point of view, I completely agree.

Among the damage to me, I know my wife failed herself too, now what?
As I've noted, none of my wife's choices reflect on me, but my choices in R do.
Too many people stay in an M and stay miserable.
If I'm going to stay I'm going to look at being in the best possible relationship or I need to move on.
Best possible R, best possible relationship includes what I can do to be better and do better too.

Yes, yes, and yes! Spot on, I fully agree with the above statements.

Asterisk

If it is true that one can never know another and that my task is to "unknow" what I think I know of my wife, then where and how does "trust" fit into this equation? What is it built upon? Where is its foundation if everything is unknowable?

I don’t know, it’s hard to explain what I’m thinking.

By unknowing, or not knowing, I am really saying, drop all the conceptual narrative baggage and just see the person as they are right in front of you. Don’t fill in the gaps, accept that there are things you don’t know.

If you google on "Consciousness Weekly 4 Conceptual Influence on Experience" hopefully you’ll hit a page with this…

The beliefs upon which self and culture stand are not easily recognized, nor are they easily discarded once we identify them. Remember that both culture and self are created in much the same way—they’re the products of many foundation assumptions. These assumptions—accepting particular ideas to such a degree that they become taken for granted realities—give structure to our lives. They are the backdrop for our sense of self and reality, and they offer what seems like solid ground in a world of uncertainty. We may benefit from such a structure, but we need to recognize that our assumptions are also responsible for most of the limitations and suffering that we experience. What generally goes unnoticed is that they are not facts but merely beliefs and conceptual inventions, and since they are conceptual in nature, they are not necessary in and of themselves.

And

When you interact with others, consider how much your concepts influence your experience of them. Do you actually see them or do you see your concepts about them? Try to notice the difference between your concepts of others vs them.

This all sounds sort of abstract and out of the ether until you go back to D-Day, and how all of those assumptions were blown up by the reality of what stood in front of you. How much did the concept of your wife influence what you saw of her while she was having her affair? What would you have seen if you had actually saw her, not-knowing all of those assumptions you carried in?

By unknowing, or not knowing, I am really saying, drop all the conceptual narrative baggage and just see the person as they are right in front of you. Don’t fill in the gaps, accept that there are things you don’t know.

Difficult to do in practice, but the closer one can get oneself to this ideal, the better.

Finding out the real person is part of what wise people do in finding a partner. The potential partners talk to find out areas of likes and not-likes, agreements and disagreements. They probeto verify what they perceive and stay together or split based on whether the fit is good enough.

So I think it's probably better to say something like, 'One person can't know another completely. There can always be a surprise lurking, and that surprise is likely to come out when the person is stressed in the right/wrong way. Just as important, people change over time.'

Hey Asterisk -

Great question.

I don’t know, is that really true? Isn’t justifiable "blame" nessissary in order to ferrit out the behavior that is inappropreate? And in the process, isn’t very important to discover one’s own blame?

Let me amend my first statement of "blame doesn't solve much" since my actual approach to life is, in the history of humanity, blame has never solved a single thing.

To clarify, assigning blame is easy and we always know fault when we see it.

Cheating is Universally wrong, in every faith, every culture and even the most secular among us understands that when a relationship has troubles, cheating doesn't help.

My wife cheated. Blame isn't going to solve her problem or mine.

Let me add the first 35-years of my life were fairly miserable, I lived on blame. It was my go to answer for everything wrong in my life. My bumper sticker was, "life sucks, then you die" -- pretty close to the "we are born, we suffer and die" conclusion we've seen in the forum already.

I lived the blame game.

My childhood included one alcoholic biological father who abandoned us when I was five and he was replaced with a step-father who beat me like a drum. I learned to take a literal gut punch at nine-years old. Being able to take punches as a kid may or may not be the skill set I was looking for, but it did help me during my six years in the U.S. Marine Corps.

I have three brothers, two of them are still miserable and continue to blame my mother for their childhoods and their misery.

All that and plenty of examples of how blame throttled productivity or team chemistry at every job I worked.

My third dad, the step-father who stepped in at the end was a pretty decent guy. Although, tended to hire friends to help with home repairs as professional tradesmen tended to charge too much. One such friend replaced a broken pipe, didn't clear the dust from the crawl space, and the embers from the soldering iron burnt our house down.

The first example I saw, my step-dad knew his friend didn't do it on purpose. We all knew who to blame, but suing a guy just as poor as us wouldn't give us a place to live.

That example was, I saw my step-dad jump to solutions and didn't spend a single second blaming anyone. I saw the lesson then, but it took me over a decade to understand it and apply it to myself.

House is gone, now what?

My wife cheated, now what?

Spending time blaming my wife doesn't heal me.

So, it is simply a solutions based approach to life. I can say the day I stopped blaming anyone or anything external for my misery, it was a pretty good day.

I'm responsible for my happiness. Sure, my family can amplify or detract my feelings, but I'm in charge of how I feel.

This foundational shift was definitely blown up on dday. My wife taking full responsibility helped us move forward, but some emotional trauma takes a lot longer to process.

To me, blame is waste of my time and energy.

If I do something wrong, I own it and figure out how to solve the problem. If someone wrongs me, and they don't own it, I have to either cut that person out or help them solve their issues, based strictly on how much I want the person around.

The difference is, when I blamed everyone for my misery, I found I could be as miserable as I wanted for as long as I wanted. When I owned my misery, it went away.

As my counselor noted, we feel what we feel, but at some point, we can influence and change those feelings.

It doesn't mean I am happy 24/7, I don't think we're built that way. We have all the feels for different days and different reasons. However, I found that being responsible for me and how I feel turned out to be empowering.

The thread has mentioned the person in front of us and trust -- well, I trust me. I know what my wife's good habits look like and her bad habits, and well, poker face -- I can tell when she is struggling to tell me something. I trust me to chase the answers I need to be in a safer environment.

Everyone asks about the worst case and she cheats again.

Anything is possible, but I know me. I will be fine. I'll be on the next solution.

In the meanwhile, I own my happiness, and as such, it helps the M, since I am not blaming my wife for my feelings, it helps her heal too.

These days, I find life is far too short to waste on things that don't make it better.